The Middle-Wait Class

My friend Harry always calls me an ambulance driver. I didn't realize how much the term had grown on me until I used it about myself when he wasn't around. He's sneaky like that.

I'll explain the term, by way of explaining how it came to be used. For a long time I have little phrases, some might say mottos, that I use when giving advice or talking on particular subjects. A simple interesting phrase allows me to anchor the idea or concept; then depending on the forum, the time available and the particular audience I can tailor the message appropriately in real-time. As someone who spends a lot of time in reflection, I found it helpful to have a handful of these anchoring statements to organize and summarize my worldviews.

The particular behavior that Harry observed, we spoke about frequently, and ultimate won me the label of ambulance driver was this:

It's either the gas or the brake, but it's all the way down.

I'm not sure if I heard it somewhere else, or like many of my phrases, it just spewed forth in some conversation one day and I liked how it sounded so it got added to the repertoire. In any case, it is definitely a frequently exercised one.

To be practical, a phrase like this shouldn't need much explanation, and I have found this one resonates with most people pretty quickly. Not that they agree, but that they understand and can see how I strive to apply this to my life. On the contrary, most people disagree with varying degrees of vehemence.

Generally speaking people strive to be risk averse. They want to compromise and counter their need for change with a passion for passivity and a sense of stability. We do this in our personal lives, we do this in our careers, and companies (which are clusters of individuals) do this with their strategies.

Sometimes understanding a new view on the world or being honest about the underlying views that are actually driving us, requires we step back and introduce some objectivity. To that end, let's examine the corollary to the previous motto that applies to design choices or corporate strategy:

The Middle Always Costs More

This one may have been so obvious as to be blinding so let's examine how this applies to companies.

Generally speaking innovation inside a market happens similarly every time. The first mover is often an outsider because they have the least to lose. They have no market-share to risk and much to gain with even small successes. The next group are the current leaders. Sitting on top of their market, they can generally afford to make the investments and manage the risks. They have the unique insight that is only accessible to the guy sitting on top of the pile. Lastly, those in the middle might work up the gumption to delve into the fray. Usually the just wait and watch to see how things shake out before moving.

This last group of middle performers, of compromisers, are the ones who need assurances and guarantees. Being afraid to fail, they won't move until it becomes clear (to them) where success lies, which 'bets' will pay off, or that their current plan really is pulling a Dodo bird.

When you only take 'bets' that are sure things, you aren't really betting. When you aren't betting, you can pretty much predict the mediocrity of the outcome. When you only move because you are forced to because the market is self destructing, you'll continue to sit in the middle of any market you make it into. And your company will be all the other mediocre middle-waits.

It is the ambulance drivers who get to the scene first. They are willing to take calculated risks. They drive fast but very controlled. They break rules, but within constraints and boundaries. They put a single focus first and set aside all other conventions and norms in the headlong pursuit to achieve it. And they do it without a racecar. They do it with all the tools and gear they'll need so when they arrive on the scene, they can really add value. They don't just get themselves there, they bring help with them.

Usually when I get on the scene, it is a big bloody mess. Sometimes the patient dies in the back before we get them to the hospital and that is sad but unavoidable. It's the valiant effort, the commitment to try, the desire to really help and to do it regardless of what everyone else sitting in traffic has on their agenda that makes an ambulance driver effective.

You might not always enjoy riding along with an ambulance driver, but everyone hates being stuck in traffic with all the other middle-waits.

Keeping My Square Edges

When you hit crunch time on a project, the stress increase has the wonderful effect of showcasing the individual contributions which aren't always apparent. Strengths and weaknesses are illuminated most when risk (and therefore stress) is highest.

You may have heard others talk about stress as a way to weed out those who can't cut it. To identify those people with weaknesses and therefore cull them. Increasing stress works both ways, you can spot both weaknesses and strengths this way. The difference between smart people and lazy people is what they do with this information.

Surely, you can remove people based on their weaknesses, but is that really the best way to get top performers? Not in my experience, and I'm not the only one. A whole slew of authors are writing about this balance between strength and weakness. For example, Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham, or Teach With Your Strengths by Rosanne Liesveld , Jo Ann Miller , and Jennifer Robison.

Historically, the path to improvement has always been through building up your weak areas, not downplaying them (or better yet, avoiding them entirely!). We give people feedback on the areas they aren't performing, ostensibly so they'll get better.

When was the last time you got a review or feedback that focused on what you did well and only glossed over how you could improve? We have been obsessed with it, and therefore churn out contributors who try and be well-rounded or generic, living in constant fear their weaknesses will be exposed. Because of this close-mindedness, they are never able to pour themselves headlong into their strengths. Like a fly buzzing around, they are constantly distracted by their weaknesses, so they never put full force into their punches.

This is most definitely not how I give feedback. If I'm going to spend energy and time to think about and communicate my analysis of someone else, it is going to be practical. We will celebrate your accomplishments and spend time talking about how you can use the things you do well to really knock peoples socks off and be smashingly successful. Then maybe if you have really pissed someone off or are offensively negligent in some area, we'll mention how you can either avoid those situations, or how to minimize the damage when they happen. There is no sense trying to make a surgical scalpel into a hammer.

For my own performance, the same rules apply. Certainly I am critical of my failures and short-comings, but only as they distract from my ability to perform with my strengths to their maximum potential. Rather then dwell on not being a white guy with shiny, gleaming, perfect teeth, bushy hair, a perfect handshake and who looks at home in a suit, I play my geeky, straight-shooter, mushroom-like role to the hilt. And then I bring a white guy with full hair, a nice tie, and a firm handshake to the meeting. He talks his white-guy talk and does the secret handshakes so I can focus on the important details necessary for us to actually deliver.

When we try and force people into being generic and "well-rounded" we are really asking them to knock off their typically square edges so you can shove them into your round holes. I like my edges and try to respect the edges of others.

No one can do it all. Recognize what you can do really well and then avoid or compensate for the rest.

The Expert Road

There are a few things I'm really good at. One or two I am extremely great at. And a host of things at which I suck horribly. I know you are thinking this is totally obvious, but stick with me. I'm going somewhere with this one.

Generally speaking, you can drop people into of three categories concerning any skill. They're either Novice, Experienced, or Expert. When you are first learning something you are a Novice. You don't really know anything and you have no muscle or long-term memory for the skill at this stage. Once you have developed some proficiency you can move past the Novice stage and enter the Experienced stage. At this point in development, you either commit or you give up. Those who commit can eventually become Experts. Those who give up stay in the realm of the Experienced.

Whether it is about building products and services to be consumed, or in your own development, identifying when the commitment point occurs is key to understanding your adoption rate and capability for advancement.

Being a novice sucks. When you are just learning any new skill you always stink. At some point, with practice or just time, you stop being awful. That's the point when you move into Experienced. Unfortunately, sometimes we are willing to settle at the proficiency level we have reached simply because the effort to advance is too great. I don't want to try and get better, because trying something new means I'm going to suck again. After all the effort I put in so I don't stink as a Novice, if I move to the Experienced bracket I'm just falling right back into being horrible again.

If you aren't passionate or motivated, if the costs to get better are just too high, you get stuck. But the reality is, the better you get at something, the more fulfilling it will be. The more successful you are with a skill, the more joy and excitement you will feel from exercising it.

So how do you make sure your product or service won't lull people into this middle ground? How can you un-stick yourself when you realize you are settling for mediocrity?

For products and services you need to understand your Attrition Rate. What percentage gives up? What features were used or not before attrition? When considering the effort involved in adoption, what can be provided to help speed the transition into experienced?

For yourself it can help to keep your eye on the end goal. Remember that passion can ebb and flow, especially as you reach each new level and realize how much further your progression can go. It's natural to be daunted because you suck with something new. Focus on the result, establish the habits daily so you aren't fighting yourself everyday. When you do reach a new level, revel in it for a while.

Size Matters

When you are buying property, how much property you are talking abut really does matter. If you want to buy a house to live in, they care about your income, your personal ability to pay the mortgage. If you are buying a 20 unit apartment building they care about the occupancy rates and your ability to keep it occupied. It really as simple as that. The deal factors change with the size of the deal. But within certain ranges, the factors don't change at all. Buy a 10 million dollar house to live in, they still care about your income. Buy a 1000 unit apartment block and they still only care about occupancy rates and your management experience.

Now, I've estimated, planned, negotiated and sold dozens of technology deals that exceeded 3 million. I've done the same for a double handful of 10+ million dollar deals. And I've worked on one or two that reached the 50 million mark. The thing they have in common is that when it comes to the estimates, the plans, and the negotiations, the factors don't change. The delivery changes drastically, the oversight and number of hands in the pie sure change, but the actual work involved doesn't. The steps you go through, questions you ask, information you need to digest is basically the same regardless of the size of the deal. Which you only realize if you've successfully done it a few times.

Just like my friends who are think buying a 5-unit townhouse is the same as financing their second mortgage. You can always tell who has come out the other side having learned something by the way they approach their next deal. The ones who only survived their deal, who came out the other side but weren't changed, haven't evolved, who didn't learn anything, they're the ones who approach every deal the same way. They have a hammer that works, and they just keep whacking away assuming they'll hit some nails eventually.

If you want to make sure you aren't one of the un-evolved ones, make sure you are seeking first to understand. That's a little phrase I picked up from someone much smarter than myself, but I find myself using it way to often. In my mind, it sums up the attitude of the nimble among us. It separates those who are continually learning, from those who think they've got it figured out and are waiting for the world to agree with them. When you play in the realm of architects and executives, you see both attitudes often enough. Most of being a great architect or executive is being willing to make decisions, to hold a vision in your head and be articulate about that vision. This means there is a very fine line to walk when you are surrounded by ambiguity and collaborating with numerous conflicting opinions and personalities. You have to be very nimble or you'll quickly end up on the wrong side of the line.

If you are seeking first to understand, you will spend more of your time upfront listening and questioning. But you can't spend all your time there. At some point you have to discern the relevant information, express some decisions, be willing to wrong and allow others to correct you, and then drive for consensus. You must engage first to understand, but if all you do is understand and can't utilize that information, the value vanishes. You can be told the difference between financing your home and a multi-unit dwelling, but if you don't chance your approach and act on the information, you've lost the value. You are just as effective as if you kept hammering away with your single tool.

When it comes down to it, it is the size of your ears that matter most. But a nimble attitude and brains are also needed if you don't want to look goofy.

The Line Between Good And Great

Staffing a project can be a unique sort of puzzle. It can be very similar to the exercise many start-up companies go through trying to find talent. The problem is that it can be really hard to recognize talent on paper. And when it comes to building solutions or delivering real business value you often need engineers who can do more than just cut code. Consider what Paul Graham wrote:

But when I think about what killed most of the startups in the e-commerce business back in the 90s, it was bad programmers. A lot of those companies were started by business guys who thought the way startups worked was that you had some clever idea and then hired programmers to implement it. That's actually much harder than it sounds—almost impossibly hard in fact—because business guys can't tell which are the good programmers. They don't even get a shot at the best ones, because no one really good wants a job implementing the vision of a business guy.
-- excerpt from The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups by Paul Graham

This is a spot on concern as it relates to start-ups, and is a pretty good summation that the world at large has with separating real technical talent from mediocre technical resources. To help with this, I've written down what I consider to be the key points that separate the great engineers from the herd.

First and foremost it has to be the Love of the Game. Some people call this Passionate or Enthusiastic. Regardless of how you refer to it, you know it when you see it. When an engineer truly likes being an engineer, they exercise that passion whether they are getting paid for it or not. These are the people who light up when they have a chance to explain some nuance of a solution or problem they are working on. Even when polite company would have recognized that a topic was becoming to specific or technical and gracefully glossed over the details, an engineer of passion may just not care about the social graces and bore full steam ahead unconcerned.

The inverse of this is the engineer who has a job. The get enough tech talk at work and go to "training" when they are told they need to learn something new. Engineering pays their bills, if they could make as much money doing something else, they would. When you see someone who has had the same job for years and years, has worked with the same technology, on the same application or platform and doesn't see the need to change, recognize that they may be competent but they lack the potential for greatness.

An enthusiastic engineer naturally leads to a Self-Reliant engineer. When you love something you want to know all about it. You genuinely like that there is always something new to learn. With engineering, there is the added benefit that technology is always evolving. When their heart is in it, nobody has to tell an engineer how to keep up. They do it naturally, on their own. They know that the best way to learn is just to leap in and embrace it. They don't wait for someone to send them to training, they experiment and create of their own accord. When they come upon a new technology they don't wait for the explanation, they don't need to be taught, they just jump right in and learn.

The inverse of this is the engineer who constantly needs help. They need the complete manuals, they need training materials, and samples. If they are always talking about how difficult something is to understand because of the lack materials at their disposal, if they want to get trained before they embark with a new technology, they may be competent, but they lack the potential for greatness.

Engineers who are or can be great, seek to be Wise. Anyone who has learned to be self-reliant understands (even if only subconsciously) the difference between Wisdom and Knowledge. Knowledge is the set of facts, data, or concepts that can be learned, taught, understood. Wisdom is the application of knowledge. For most people, with experience comes wisdom. The more they attempt to apply their knowledge to the world, the more they the learn about which knowledge is meaningful and practical. Knowing what you need to know and how to identify what you don't know in a particular circumstance is the most useful thing to understand when faced with the new and interesting. It is this constant self-refinement and search for the application of knowledge which can easily lead engineers to be considered socially inept. Socializing is often about compensating for differences, and celebrating commonalities and trivialities. This is completely juxtaposed with the engineers pursuit of practicality and usefulness. Engineers who are great will be able to switch their communication style between the practical and the social when appropriate.

The inverse of this is the engineer who knows only for the sake of knowing. When the emphasis is on the tests they've passed or certifications they hold, you might take a closer look. If they can't focus quickly on the criteria for success (or risks of failure), or if they aren't objective about the usefulness of their new widget then they may be competent, but they lack the potential for greatness.

To really leverage these talents an engineer should be Diverse, they should have a wide Breadth. Even early in their career an engineer with great potential will find opportunities to jump from problem space to problem space. They will find that they need more than one toolset on one platform. They'll have experience in applying their knowledge to more than one type of opportunity or industry. Any engineer who is truly experienced, will resemble an onion with layer after layer of different experiences, most of which won't be covered by a resume. They will invariably be able to find parallels with their past experiences, and will constantly be remembering skills and aspects of their work that are applicable now but which weren't significant enough to write into their cover sheet. To a great engineer, the fact that they had to write a multithreaded performance test harness, or an attribute injection lex, or an exception word map isn't really important. It was the sum of the parts they delivered which was interesting. To them it is just an assumption that to get the end result they'll have to do all the other things in between. Many of these in-between problems are significant and meaningful in other contexts all by themselves.

The inverse of this the engineer who spends all their time in the parts or focused on one technology, platform, or industry. They know all about how to make NUnit do interesting things, but have never shipped anything. They know how to build data entry applications but have never concerned themselves with how the reporting system does what it does. That database guy who doesn't really know how the front-end works should give you pause. The UI guy who draws brilliant graphic but stays away from "the backend" may be competent, but they lack the potential for greatness.

A caveat with this last one is that we all have specialties. From time to time we all need a real pro at just one thing, and it can take time to truly master some aspects of engineering. The distinction isn't that they don't have a specialty, it is that they have branched out into all the supporting and complementary areas. If you want to truly master something technical you need to understand how it overlaps with, supports, or is supported by other technologies. An amazing looking UI that takes to long to boot up, or doesn't integrate seamlessly with its data providers will ultimately be useless. Likewise the most efficient library design is worthless if consuming engineers find it hard to use.

Being having these other attributes becomes less useful if the engineer isn't Social. To be valuable long-term they need be someone that people can work with and form relationships with. In any environment, Trust is essential to mitigating risks and allowing velocity to increase. Further, independent contributors without a sense of community or social responsibility will leave their biggest value on the table. It is one thing to be able to do a thing well, it is much more valuable to be able to teach others to do it equally well. Sometimes this is referred to as leadership or mentoring but ultimately it is about being able to inspire trust and earn rapport. Often this is a latent talent that can be spotted very early by contributions that person makes to the community at large. A willingness to be trusted, a desire to connect with others about their contributions are often signs of a valuable resource.

The inverse of this is the engineer who only works independently, has trouble establishing rapport or eliciting trust, and isn't interested in the contributors around them. If they don't see the value in community boards, hoard their specialized knowledge and aren't interested in teaching or mentoring, then you have some warning signs. The loner who solves hard problems but doesn't care to explain how and is less effective as part of a team may be competent, but they lack the potential for greatness.

An engineer with a majority of the previous traits will likely be Opinionated. Simply put, the pursuit of greatness requires an ability to recognize when things are not great. An engineer who doesn't have strong preferences and habits is neither going to be decisive nor efficient. Efficiencies are only capable when you can rely on habits, known patterns, and economies of scale. These things require some level of standardization and best practices in place. A key trait of someone with the potential for greatness is that while they may often be wrong, they are rarely in doubt. It is this confidence in their ability, proven by their experiences, backed with their reason and intellect that allows them to make progress where others have stalled, to act quickly while others are paralyzed. It isn't that they are rigid in their preferences and opinions, quite the opposite, they may change their course much more often than seems normal. Being able to have an opinion is important, so is being able to change or let that opinion go when appropriate. The best engineers can assimilate the opinions and preferences of others which allows them be more accurate in their reasoning, even on an unknown landscape.

The inverse of this is the engineer whose opinions are too rigid, who holds to standards and habits long after the need or advantage for change is apparent. If the mind is too closed, reason will inevitably fail. Consider the age of toolset the engineer chooses and the terminology they use. If you arbitrarily alter the assumptions in a problem space and witness a lot of discomfort or inability to change tactics and approach quickly then you should be cautious. An engineer who presents the same tools and approach to every problem may be very competent in that space, but they lack the potential for greatness.

This list is more a guide to potential. The wrong situation, personality fit, or environment can make a great engineer useless. A healthy environment can take someone with mediocre skills but strong potential and give them an avenue to be great. Of course, that's just been my experience, YMMV.

Hopefully this list can help you spot competent engineers if that is what you are looking for; they certainly have their uses. After all, everyone can't meet the standard of great. You don't have to staff your team or project or company with only great people. If you have competent people, and a few people with the capability to become great, then the right environment will allow their potential to be realized. If you can't afford the risk, get at least one great engineer, and let them find the other competent engineers to round out their team.